Gospel music has long faced questions about how far it can travel beyond the sounds audiences associate with worship.
For Afro-Gospel artistes, the conversation has become more pronounced as contemporary African music draws on Afrobeats, Amapiano, electronic dance music and hip-hop. Where does an artiste draw the line between musical experimentation and spiritual compromise? For Gaise Baba, the answer lies in allowing the sound to evolve without compromising the faith at its centre.
On God Is Cooking, his latest album, the Nigerian gospel artiste explores a range of contemporary sounds while keeping his Christian faith at the centre of his music. From the electronic dance music textures of “Oruko” to the hip-hop influences running through the project, Gaise approaches genre as a means of communicating faith rather than a boundary that determines how faith should sound.
“The test I apply is simple: does the sound serve the message, or does the message now exist to justify the sound?” he tells The Nollywood Reporter. “The moment the priority inverts, the moment I am chasing a sonic trend and constructing a spiritual message to justify it, the integrity of the music is compromised.”
The Message Comes Before the Sound
For Gaise, musical experimentation starts with a question: what does a song need to communicate? Rather than choosing a sound because it is fashionable or unexpected, he considers the message first, then looks for the sonic environment that carries it most effectively.
“Oruko” illustrates this approach. A song about identity and declaration, it takes an unexpected turn into electronic dance music. “When the message is about identity and declaration, something that moves the body, that occupies the full physical experience, felt right,” he explains. “Not because I wanted to surprise people. Because I wanted the listener to feel the weight of that declaration in their chest and in their feet, not just process it intellectually.”
His reasoning challenges the idea that a song’s spiritual value depends on its instrumentation or genre. “I also believe strongly, as I have said before, that we should be careful not to confuse familiarity with holiness,” he argues. “The idea that sacred truth can only travel through one kind of sound is a cultural assumption, not a theological one.”
That does not mean every experiment is worthwhile simply because it is new. For Gaise, the distinction lies between experimentation that grows out of a song’s purpose and a pursuit of trends that determines what the song becomes.
The same conviction informs how he has responded to commercial success. After “No Turning Back II” became one of the biggest songs of his career, he says he resisted the temptation to recreate its appeal on subsequent projects. Rather than reverse-engineering its success, he continued to explore sounds that served the message he wanted to communicate.
Looking Back to Move Afro-Gospel Forward
Gaise’s interest in expanding Afro-Gospel’s sonic possibilities is matched by a desire to acknowledge the musicians who connected Christian expression with indigenous Nigerian music. That history features prominently on “LENU”, the opening track of God Is Cooking, which samples a 1922 recording by Reverend J. J. Ransome-Kuti.
Ransome-Kuti was a clergyman and composer known for setting Christian hymns to indigenous music and writing hymns in Yoruba. The draft’s claim that he was the first Nigerian to record and release a music album requires historical verification, but his work provides an important reference point for Gaise’s approach to gospel music.
“He was doing in 1922 what I am trying to do now, carrying sacred truth through a sound that belongs to this people, this land, this culture,” Gaise reflects.
Opening the album with “LENU” places that historical connection at the beginning of the listening experience. Before listeners encounter the project’s contemporary rhythms and varied production, they hear a reference to an earlier period in which Christian music was expressed through indigenous musical traditions.
Ransome-Kuti’s family history adds another dimension to the connection. He was Fela Kuti’s grandfather, while Fela’s music became associated with cultural criticism and speaking truth to power. Gaise sees a relationship across these different musical legacies, tracing a thread between faith, sound and cultural confrontation.
“That thread, faith, sound, cultural confrontation, runs through Nigerian music in ways we do not always trace clearly enough,” he explains. “I wanted to honour that thread and place God Is Cooking deliberately inside it.”
Building a Bigger Table for Afro-Gospel
The idea of a broader musical conversation also informs the collaborators Gaise brings into God Is Cooking. The album features Nigerian artistes Greatman Takit, Lawrence Oyor, Cofi Boham and Kaestrings, alongside South African gospel singer Nontokozo Mkhize.
For Gaise, collaboration matters more for what another artiste brings to a song than for the audience they might attract. He is wary of features that function primarily as commercial transactions, preferring partnerships in which each contributor adds something the project needs.
Mkhize’s appearance brings a South African gospel perspective to an album rooted in Gaise’s experience of Nigerian music and Christian expression. “The table is continental,” he describes. “The meal is for all of us.”
The meal metaphor extends to the album’s structure, which Gaise presents as a 13-course experience, with each song serving a distinct purpose within a larger vision. That approach also connects his recorded music to his work beyond the studio.
Through LightOut, his high school initiative, Gaise uses music and conversation to engage young people on identity, peer pressure, substance use and values. ARAMANDA creates a platform for alternative Christian sound through music and arts, while Black Flame gives him space to explore the ideas behind his music through longer conversations.
These projects extend his interest in taking Christian expression into different spaces, whether through music, youth engagement or conversations about culture and faith.
“None of these is separate projects that happen to share my name,” he says. “They are all expressions of one thing: the conviction that kingdom culture belongs in every room, and that my job is to help it get there.”
